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Time:         2016-08-12 06:05:14 UTC
Original URL: http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2016/08/new-trek-series-committed-to-casting-diversity-main-character-wont-be-captain/
Title:        New Trek series committed to casting diversity, main character won’t be captain | Ars Technica
Author:       Andrew Cunningham
Published:    Aug 11, 2016 2:53 pm UTC

martyb [soylentnews.org] writes in with the story New Trek series committed to casting diversity, main character won’t be captain | Ars Technica [arstechnica.com]

Series is set 10 years before the USS Enterprise's five-year mission.

We still don't know much specific information about Star Trek: Discovery, the franchise's return to television [arstechnica.com] after over a decade, but showrunner Bryan Fuller has dropped a few more hints during the Television Critics Association press tour this week.

According to TV Guide [tvguide.com], the show's lead character will be a woman, but she won't be the captain of the USS Discovery. All iterations of Star Trek, especially from The Next Generation onward, have had an ensemble cast to some degree, but the commanding officer's perspective has usually been the most important.

"To see a character from a different perspective on a starship, who has a different dynamic [and] relationship with the captain and with subordinates, felt like it was going to give us richer context [and allow us to] have different types of stories with that character," said Fuller.

Discovery will be firmly committed to diversity in casting, a traditional virtue of olderTrek series (at least relative to what other contemporary TV shows were doing). In addition to the female lead, Fuller hopes to cast an openly gay character, and The Hollywood Reporter says [hollywoodreporter.com] that the rest of the seven-character cast will be rounded out by "a female admiral, a male Klingon captain, a male admiral, a male adviser and a British male doctor." Fuller also wants to have more aliens on the show and to have those alien races look more like aliens and less like humans in heavy makeup.

And we're getting a few more details on where Discovery will fit into Trek's vast fictional universe. Fuller says the show is set in the "Prime" Trek timeline—not the "Kelvin" timeline established by JJ Abrams' rebooted film franchise in 2009—and will deal with an event referenced but not fully explored in past Trek fiction. The show will be set a decade before the USS Enterprise's five-year mission documented by the original series, and while this opens up the door to original series characters that fans may already be familiar with, Fuller wants Discovery's first season to focus on establishing the new characters.

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